My Own Country
It was strange to see Vickie’s surname on a road sign. It didn’t seem to go with what I knew of her financial circumstance. The only people I knew who had things named after them in Johnson City were the city. Like the Gumps of “Gump Addition,” a subdivision where some of the most stately homes of Johnson City were situated. But here, in Tester Hollow, in this junglelike setting, the names of the McCrays, as well as their kinfolk, the Millers, the Testers and the Grangers, were immortalized. They may not have succeeded in raising themselves completely out of poverty, but they had ensured themselves one kind of immortality.
I came onto Vickie’s trailer just as soon as I turned off Tester Hollow Road and into McCray Road. It sat fifty yards back from the road, up on the gradient, with the trees and the wild grass reclaiming the earth behind the trailer and rising steeply behind it. There was just enough room in the clearing in front of the trailer to park two cars. The sheet metal of the trailer reflected my blue Datsun Z and Vickie’s bile-green Torino. She referred to her car as a “junker”: she told me it was in such poor shape that she carried parts in the back seat.
The trailer was a sixty-by-twelve. Its metal roof was rounded in the manner of a railway carriage. The oil furnace was strapped to one end of the trailer like a backpack. The other end of the trailer abutted on a tiny two-room shack with a red roof and white window frames. The trailer had been parked to make a “T” with the shack.
A crude latticework provided a skirting for the trailer. The skirting was missing big pieces here and there, and I could see the welded metal tongue by which the trailer had been hauled up there. The wheels had been removed and the trailer rested on a stack of cinder blocks. Pipes led from under the belly of the trailer into the sewer.
There were no other dwellings to be seen anywhere around. Later that day, Vickie would drive me farther into Tester Hollow, show me how McCray Road looped around in a full circle and how there were in fact other houses and trailers and shacks around, but each with plenty of brush and forest separating it from its nearest neighbor. A quarter mile up the street from Vickie’s house, on an unpaved trail that led steeply down from the main road, were the houses of Clyde’s cousins and his mother.
Vickie’s trailer may have been small and nothing to write home about, but, by God, they had their privacy and a gorgeous setting.
I negotiated the cinder-block steps to the small porch and entered the house. Vickie gave me a warm hug. She was wearing her bandanna and there were deep rings around her eyes. She told me that Clyde had slept little the previous night and that he was now fast asleep. The children were at school; it was a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. She led me into the house.
The kitchen was to the left, really just a part of the living room and separated from it by a counter. To the right was a hallway. The floor was red linoleum. Everywhere I looked was dark paneling.
“You ever been in a trailer before?” Vickie asked.
“I have, but I wouldn’t mind the tour.”
I had once gone with Allen to visit a friend of his who was ill and Allen had wanted me to “check him over.” The man lived in a trailer in Erwin. When I went to use the bathroom, I saw a monster river rock parked on top of the commode lid. The man explained that sewer rats had been climbing up the pipes and coming out of the commode. Though it hadn’t happened to him, it had happened to others in the trailer park. One such sewer rat, “the size of a grandfather skunk,” had, he claimed, “bitten a chunk out of this ol’ feller’s balls, and another done took a piece of this old lady’s ass.” The river rock was there to make sure no rat came in and settled in the dead space of the trailer, either under the stove or in the ceiling. Despite his reassurance, I found myself quite disinclined to pee at his house, and confident I could hold my water till we got to the forest outside.
“Clyde’s sleeping so let’s leave that end of the house for last,” Vickie said.
Vickie led me down the hallway to the right. A teeny-tiny bedroom opened off the hallway. The hallway then ended in a bigger bedroom. A half-bath sat between the two bedrooms.
“This is Danielle’s room,” Vickie said as we walked into the big bedroom. She went to the window and began cranking a lever. “These are jalousie windows—they crank out. I tell Danielle to keep them closed because I do believe that magnolia tree outside is what makes her wheeze. Every time I close it, she opens it.”
There was a dresser in the bedroom that was built into the wall with a large mirror and a picture of Michael Jackson above it. Vickie showed me how the built-in closets on either side of the dresser had sliding doors that when they slid back covered the dresser and mirror. The space-efficient designs of the trailer were impressive.
There were floor vents in each room.
“That’s where the heat comes in. It can get as cold as a headstone in here, come January. Particularly ‘cause we ain’t insulated the bottom of the trailer too well. But I tell you what, you stand over one of these vents in your nightgown in winter and it’ll warm you right up, son; puff you up like a hot-air balloon.”
We walked back to the kitchen and toward the other end of the trailer. There was a utility room where the washer and dryer were. A back door next to the utility room was the trailer’s other exit.
“You seen that shack outside? Well, Danielle was born in it. Can you believe we used to live in that till we got us this trailer? We use it to store stuff now.”
Past the utility room was a master bath. The trailer ended in the master bedroom where Clyde lay on the bed, curled up like a baby, his arms tucked between his thighs, snoring loudly. Also between his thighs was the remote control for the TV; the TV was on, and it filled the room with the dialogue of a midday soap opera.
When Clyde was in the hospital we ruled out syphilis and other treatable infections of the brain. His childlike behavior, the complete disappearance of his previous personality, the prolonged hiccups, and the motor slowing and apathy were all the result of HIV directly affecting the cells of the cortex. As yet, we had nothing with which to treat the HIV. Vickie had decided to take him home. A visiting nurse came by daily to assist Vickie.
When Vickie first brought Clyde home he was both bedridden and demented. He recognized only his immediate family. Even that was inconsistent: he addressed his cousin once as if he were the preacher. Sometimes he looked at Vickie with puzzlement, until she told him who she was.
Now we both stood looking at the sleeping Clyde. Vickie had told me over the phone that Clyde showed little interest in the outside world. His sole passion was television; it absorbed him and he would never let it be turned off, day or night. Vickie told me he could become agitated if he was taken too far from it.
I was fascinated by this: modern television, it seemed to me, robbed the mind—a healthy mind—of its need to explore the recesses of its subconscious. The fabric of dreams such as love, murder, war, incest, betrayal, riches, now played on the screen incessantly, removing all mystery, leaving the mind with little to imagine, no uncharted areas of fancy that had not been reduced to a miniseries or a sitcom. But in Clyde’s case, he used the television concretely. It was his mind. Its buzz and hum and incessant flashing images and commentary filled the void behind his eyes and the silence in his head. To turn it off was to turn him off.
At first, Vickie had used a condom catheter to catch his urine in a bag tied to the bed. Clyde was able to tell her when he wanted to have a bowel movement. She would help him up and they would hook the urine bag to the walker. With Vickie walking behind him, Clyde would lean heavily on the walker and they would negotiate the narrow doorway and turn into the master bathroom.
Vickie told me that one day, after she had helped him to the bathroom, she was sitting in the living room, waiting for him to call her and tell her he was done. When she looked up, she saw him standing in the kitchen doorway, without the walker, looking wobbly. She jumped up to hold him, but he told her to back away and he made his way unsteadily to the couch. Vickie said she had cried to see
this small victory.
From that day on, Clyde had gotten back to his feet more and more, taking to bed only if he was tired. His motor skills had returned even if his intellectual skills had not. Clyde had improved enough to wander off down the road to his mother’s house or to his cousin’s house. Vickie, who was still working a full shift at Pet Dairy, would return to find him gone and would have to call around to see where he was. At times he landed in downtown: he had simply wandered out of the hollow, hitched a ride with a stranger, and headed to his favorite watering hole.
He had begun to resent Vickie’s controlling him, much like a child might resent it. When she went to his mother’s house or his cousin’s house to pick him up, he would sulk and sometimes refuse to leave.
It was difficult for me to look at the sleeping Clyde and picture him walking about Tester Hollow, hitching rides to town.
We tiptoed out of the bedroom and went out and sat on the porch, our feet resting on the cinder-block stairs. Vickie brought us both coffee. Vickie lit a cigarette. It was perfect weather; the sun did not shine right on the house and it was cool in the hollow. On the other side of the road, I saw a trail winding up the slope between the trees. I could picture Clyde, Jr., and Danielle playing up there, or Clyde heading up there to hunt squirrel or possum.
Neither Vickie nor I were inclined to say much. We both sat with our elbows resting on our knees, staring out. I glanced at Vickie; I was struck again by her eyes: beautiful blue eyes that were now looking at the land around her and at the sky, taking it all in as if seeing it for the first time. The wound on her hand from where she had punched her cousin had healed. I could not help smiling at the thought of her busting her cousin in the chops. Vickie saw my expression and turned and asked, “What?” drawing out the first two letters until the word sounded like Whooo-at?
“Nothing,” I said.
“Like hell, nothing,” she said, and we both laughed.
I felt the trailer shake beneath us and I looked inquiringly at Vickie. “Hell, that’s just Clyde turning in bed. You can feel a tick burp in here. It don’t take much to shake the trailer.” She smiled. “One time Clyde and I were doing our thing back there, you kno’what I mean? And the headboard of that bed was slapping the wall, just a-slapping it, and Clyde moaning like a bellyached hawg. He had a gun rack above the bed where he kept an old squirrel rifle and a hunting bow with razor-head arrows in a quiver. Well, that gun rack fell right onto the bed, and one of them arrows gave him a nick, right on his butt. Scared the hell out of him, and he yelled, I won’t tell you what. And I thought he done come so big he had a heart attack. And the kids came running in screaming, thinking I killed him. There was so much noise you couldn’t hear your ears. Thank God the rifle didn’t go off.”
It took me a while to stop laughing. “How are things with you and him, Vickie? Are you angry with Clyde?”
The smile vanished and Vickie stared into the distance. She took a pull on her cigarette, making the tip glow a long time; it was forever before the smoke came pouring out of her nose and mouth as she sighed and said, “Yes and no.” She tilted her chin up and blew the rest of the smoke out. “I know I ought to be angry for what he done to me, to the family. But I just can’t get angry. There he is,” she said, pointing back to the house with her cigarette, “like a child. When Junior comes back from school, Clyde’ll be rolling with Junior on the carpet, playing with Junior’s toys, looking up at me with those puppy-dog eyes. And how he got AIDS is from being a child, from not knowing better. I mean he has always been kind of a child—it’s what I loved about him when I married him.
“I know he’d been married before. Still, I felt I was marrying a child. Though, I tell you what, he showed me some bed stuff that warn’t no child’s play. He knew all that stuff. Oh, he learned me that good. Those first few years we had no money and all we did was go to bed and get it going just about any chance we had!”
There was a broad smile on Vickie’s face and she blushed.
“But to answer your question, ever since I found out he has AIDS, I’ve been feeling too sorry for him to be angry with him. No one deserves to be sick lik’at,” she said pointing back again. “No one deserves to lose their mind lik’at.”
A car squealed round the curve: a Camaro with all the paint gone and the dull coppery metal showing through. It had oversize black tires, shining with Armor All, and elaborate, sparkling, custom hubs. A brief glimpse of the driver conveyed an impression of youth, of scruffy long hair, grubby hands on the wheel. The interior of the car was as bad as the body. It was extraordinary to see this fastidiousness with wheels while ignoring the rest of the car.
“Know him?” I asked Vickie.
“Hell yes. A Granger boy. Know everyone that come by here, just about.”
We watched the car till it vanished out of sight. We could hear it for another minute or two and then it was gone.
Vickie was the first to break the silence.
“A couple of days ago, I lost it with Clyde. I was at the stove fixing oatmeal when he pipes up from the dining table: ‘Why, hell, I think I might just go around and give this to as many people as I can. Seeing as someone done gave it to me’—he has moments like that when he speaks just as clear as you please, just like the old Clyde. I was so shocked! I thought I would hit the floor right there. Well, I just lit into him. I had the oatmeal in my hand and it wouldn’t have taken much for me to fling it on him. I said: ‘You’ve already done put the death sentence on two people. Don’t you even dare think about it, or I’ll kill you myself, you son-of-a-bitch.’ Son, he never has talked that way again, and I don’t think he will.”
“Tell me about Jewell,” I said.
Jewell was the name that Clyde had come up with in the hospital when I asked if he had sex with men. It was possible that Jewell gave the HIV infection to Clyde, or vice versa. Jewell was not someone I knew; he did not come to our HIV clinic. Not yet. He was out there, possibly in the same shape as Clyde.
“Jewell is a family friend of Clyde’s folks. You might say he’d taken an interest in Clyde from the time Clyde was twelve years old. When I got married to Clyde, he was introduced to me as a close and dear friend.”
Another car went roaring by.
“What can I say about Jewell? He was just a good ole boy—know what I mean? Like, he wears overalls and is bald and don’t put on no airs.” Here Vickie chuckled. “Between you and me, he’s ugly as sin, but that’s neither here nor there. One thing about old Jewell, though, is that he always drives a beautiful blue Oldsmobile, a Delta 88. Trades it in every year for a new one. Seems like he always has money—he owns land and an apartment building. There’s been money in his family from way back. He helped us out with money many a time.
“Every now and then old Jewell would come by and he and Clyde would take off: they’d tell me something about needing to fix a socket or a leak at Jewell’s place or something else they had to do. And they’d be gone thirty minutes or so. I never did pay it no mind, till later.” Here Vickie turned and put her hand on my forearm: “Why, Jewell even grabbed at me a few times!”
“What kind of work does he do?” I asked.
“I don’t think Jewell works. He just has money, know what I mean? Land, property. When Clyde come out with Jewell’s name there in the hospital it set me thinking. I had heard rumors about Jewell. See, Jewell was never gay acting or nothing—if you get my meaning. I never believed the rumors. I never for a moment thought that Clyde had anything to do with that sort of stuff.”
Vickie stubbed the cigarette on the step and flicked it away into the driveway. I could see a number of stubs, some with dark brown filters, some filterless, in the gravel of the driveway, all within the same radius from the stone steps. She reached for her cigarette purse. It was leather with a side holster into which her lighter fit neatly.
“I know I shouldn’t be smoking. I switched to these ultralights? And, shit, I have to smoke ten of these to get the same buzz I used to get off o
ne of my Pall Malls.”
She offered me a cigarette and I accepted. The filter had small perforations in a circle about half an inch from its end. When I drew on it, I felt as if nothing came into my mouth, as if the shaft was broken and there was an air leak. But what little I did get into my lungs was enough to send my head spinning. Vickie looked at me curiously.
“You gone be all right?”
“Go on, Vickie.”
“When Jewell came to visit Clyde in the hospital,” she said, “it happened that Clyde had gone down for that CAT scan. There I was alone in the room with Jewell.” Vickie’s face became cold and hard as she relived this. She used the measured tones she must have used then. And when she spoke now it was with a classic east Tennessee mannerism: reaching for a higher diction and with a much clearer enunciation of each word than one would use when one was not angry:
“I said to him, I says: ‘Jewell, you are aware, are you not, of the condition what Clyde has got.’ He says, ‘Yes, Vickie, I am. And I’ve been waiting for you to say something.’ He seemed calm as anything, I could not believe it. I says, ‘Well, I have something that I need to ask you. I heard you were gay. Have you or have you not had anything to do with Clyde?’ He said, ‘I have, Vickie. I have for years.’ Just like that! No shame, no covering up. All I could bring myself to say was, ‘Then, Jewell, I reckon you ought to be tested for AIDS yo’self.’ He just looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘Vickie, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know,’ he says.”
I tried to put myself in Vickie’s shoes. How does one react to a spouse whose sexual betrayal has involved both sexes? A spouse who brings home a deadly virus? And what do you say when you confront the person who had led your spouse astray, perhaps led him astray when he was still a child, in all probability abused him?
Sitting there on Vickie’s stoop, looking down at the trees and treetops of Tester Hollow, seeing the young man in the Camaro roar by, I had a sense that all these elements—betrayal, sexual abuse, bisexuality—were much more common than anyone realized. Not just in this hollow, but in every hollow and even in the stately subdivisions. HIV infection had merely brought all this to the forefront, had exposed the acts of deceit and betrayal of trust that happened every day.